Advantages of ADO.Net over ADO

ADO stands for ActiveX Data Objects and it relies on COM whereas ADO.NET relies on managed providers defined by the .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime). ADO.NET provides consistent access to data sources such as SQL Server, as well as data sources exposed through OLE DB and XML. While there are similarities between ADO and ADO.NET, the way they operate and their foundations are quite different. The following are some Advantages of ADO.Net over ADO in basic level.

A major difference in creating connections with ADO and ADO.NET is that ADO fits all connections to all types of data sources into a single Connection object. ADO.NET can have separate Objects that represent connections to different data sources. In ADO.NET you can create multiple data provider namespaces to connect specifically with a particular data source, making access faster and more efficient and allowing each namespace to exploit the features of its targeted data provider.

ADO allows you to create client side cursors only whereas ADO.NET gives you the choice of either using client side or server side cursors.

ADO.NET introduces a new way of getting a single value from a query's results when you expect only one row and one column to return. The ADO.NET command object has an ExecuteScalar method which returns the first row and column's value from its associated query.

ADO.Net dataset represents in memory representation of a database. ADO recordsets is merely a set of rows retrieved from a data source.

ADO recordsets can hold data from one data source at a time. ADO.Net datasets can hold data from various sources and integrate the data and write it back to one or several data sources.